Photography by Samuel Bradley.
“I’ve spent a lot of time observing human behavior... And you can’t help but feel that you’re on show, which on good days is fine... But we all have days when we’d rather not show our face for whatever reason... And then it’s really hard. It’s really, really hard, because you just don’t want to engage with it.”
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From an appearance on Katie Couric’s talk show, we learn that he prefers dogs over cats (but owns neither), that if he could be a pop star it would be Jónsi from Sigur Rós, and that he thinks his name sounds like “a fart in a bath.” Elsewhere, you will discover that he is very good at accents (he played Professor Snape in an episode of The Simpsons); that he once taught in a Tibetan Buddhist monastery in India; and that one of the more inventive nicknames for him at school was “Bendy Dick Cum on My Baps.”
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The movie that might earn him an Oscar nomination is The Imitation Game, a biopic about the gay mathematician Alan Turing and his role in breaking the Enigma code used by Germany during the Second World War. Save, perhaps, Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin, Turing, with this act, did more than almost anyone else to ensure an Allied victory.
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What brings The Imitation Game to life is Cumberbatch’s immensely engaging performance as Turing, a misfit at ease with his homosexuality (he named his computer Christopher after an unrequited schoolboy crush), but utterly at odds with the world around him. To use David Leavitt’s apt comparison, Turing was a kind of real-life Mr. Spock, insensible to human discourse, and wholly unable to “read between the lines.”
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On the fact that Alan Turing had to receive a posthumous royal pardon for being gay: “It’s an insult for anybody of authority or standing to sign off on him with their approval and say, ‘Oh, he’s forgiven.’ The only person who should be [doing the] forgiving is Turing, and he can’t because we killed him. And it makes me really angry. It makes me very angry.”
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Cumberbatch, who has clearly done his research, thinks the persecution of homosexuals in the U.K. has its roots in the Cambridge Five, a group of men, some of them gay, at the highest echelons of society, who had been recruited to spy for Moscow. “It was our form of McCarthyism,” he says. “If you were intellectual, if you were gay, if you had any kind of liberal ideas, you were immediately a threat to national security.”
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“[Turing] wasn’t someone who purposefully put himself in the way of things as a protest — he was just a great role model for anyone who’s different or feels different,” says Cumberbatch. “And it’s tragic because you look at every single trajectory in his life and understand completely why he was different, why he stuttered, why he was isolated in his work. [You also see] why he was useless with men in any form of relationship — because he’d never experienced the love he deserved. And yet, within that, this man invented the idea of mechanizing mathematics — of a computer..."
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"[Turing] conquered, through cryptography, the Enigma code, which means he saved millions of lives, and, even as his body was morphing, was doing work on how the environment causes cellular structures to change. I mean, God knows, he probably would be celebrated as someone like Bill Gates. Without the shadow of a doubt, he would be held as a totem of the modern world.”
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On religious tolerance: “People are being beheaded in countries right now because of their beliefs or sexual orientations. It’s terrifying. It’s medieval — a beheading! I’d take up arms against someone who was telling me I had to believe in what they believed or they would kill me. I would fight them. I would fight them to the death. And, I believe, the older you get, you have to have an idea of what’s right or wrong. You can’t have unilateral tolerance. You have to have a point where you go, ‘Well, religious fundamentalism is wrong.’”
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Nothing about Cumberbatch screams Hollywood heartthrob, and nothing about Sherlock corresponds to a typical ladies’ man. “People keep coming up to me and saying, ‘Oh, he’s so sexy, do you think [Sherlock would be] interested in me?’ ” says Cumberbatch. “Do you not think he’d just look at you twice and tell you everything you hate about yourself and crumple you up like a little bit of paper and flick you away? He’s a machine and brutal and ruthless and has no time for the distractions of your fawning. Because, you know, they either want to make John [Watson] into a sort of cute little toy, or me into a cute toy, or we’re fucking in space on a bed, chained together.”
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On Slash Fiction: “They either want to make John [Watson] into a sort of cute little toy, or me into a cute toy, or we’re fucking in space on a bed, chained together. It’s always , like, one of them is tired, one comes back from work, the other is horny, a lump appears in his trousers, and then they’re at it. It’s usually me getting it — I’m biting Watson’s dog tags.”
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On his days at English boarding school, where sexual antics are supposedly notorious: “While there was experimentation [at Brambletye], it had never occurred to me as Oh, this is that. It was just boys and their penises, the same way with girls and vaginas and boobs. It wasn’t out of desire.”
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On being gay in Hollywood: “I think if you’re going to sell yourself as a leading man in Hollywood to say ‘I’m gay,’ sadly, is still a huge obstacle. We all know actors who are [gay] who don’t want to talk about it or bring it up, or who deny it. I don’t really know what they do to deal with it."
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"Human rights movements and sexual and gay rights movements have made huge social progress in the last 40 years, without a doubt, but there’s a lot more work to be done. I think it’s extraordinary that every time we get to a point where there’s any kind of trouble in society, people are scapegoated very, very, very quickly.”
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For Cumberbatch, boarding school was a wonderful place to grow up “because you have that complete experience of being a child,” he says. “You are not going to and from a place all the time, and I was very, very hungry for company. My mom and dad, poor them — I used to ask every Christmas and birthday for a brother or sister. That’s all I really wanted when I was growing up, because I was an only child.”
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